Hello and welcome to montrealgazette.com and welcome to Midday. Here’s the rundown on some of the stories we’re covering for you today.

The Constance-Lethbridge Rehabilitation Centre — the sole remaining anglophone institution in Quebec for adults with motor disabilities — is in danger of losing its legal right to provide services in English under a proposed “voluntary” merger with three francophone rehab facilities. The board of directors of Constance-Lethbridge had initially considered a fusion with the MAB-Mackay Rehabilitation Centre, which would have preserved its English-services designation, but “decided not to pursue” that merger for reasons that puzzle some physicians as well as MAB-Mackay. Founded in 1969, Constance-Lethbridge in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce provides therapy and technical aids to more than 8,000 adults with physical disabilities, including for traumatic brain injuries, rheumatology, chronic pain as well as neurological and neuromusculoskeletal problems. In addition to its main centre on de Maisonneuve Blvd. W., it runs a satellite facility on Hymus Blvd. in Kirkland.

Would you have surgery to lose 35 pounds? What about a procedure that involves no incision and lets you have your cake and eat it, too? Among the latest anti-obesity devices under discussion at an international conference in Montreal is an experimental method that France is currently testing as a national trial. Unlike traditional weight-loss surgery, EndoBarrier Therapy is an incisionless procedure that can be done in an outpatient day clinic. A thin plastic sleeve is passed through the mouth and installed in the upper part of the intestine, essentially creating a barrier in the bowel lining to food absorption. A barrier to nutrients means fewer calories and fewer calories means weight loss. There’s no requirement to diet. Patients can eat as usual and still lose weight. “It’s a 15-minute ‘cure’ for obesity,” said one physician in the United Kingdom after a preliminary trial with a handful of patients in 2010. The danger of such hype is that people will want it for cosmetic reasons — a vanity procedure, said Michel Gagner, bariatric surgeon at Hôpital Sacré Coeur, and president of the 19th world congress, International Federation for the Surgery of Obesity (IFSO) and metabolic disorders.

The city of Montreal could be forced to pay $21 million in damages to protesters caught in mass arrests during and after the 2012 student uprising. On Friday, Quebec’s Superior Court accepted to hear a class-action lawsuit on behalf of 1,610 people detained under the city’s controversial P6 bylaw. “I’m delighted,” said plaintiff Julien Villeneuve, the philosophy professor who dressed up as “Anarchopanda” during the protests. “The courts recognize that what we allege is not frivolous or ridiculous.” Villeneuve claims arrests made under P6 violate the constitutionally-protected right to free assembly and that police imposed harsh conditions to the hundreds of protesters they surrounded, handcuffed and arrested during eight protests between June 2012 and March 2014.

Canada’s premiers and native leaders are inviting the prime minister to take part in a roundtable discussion on murdered and missing aboriginal women, with one native leader saying Stephen Harper’s decision to reject calls for a public inquiry shows disrespect. The new if somewhat vague commitment came Wednesday at the conclusion of a meeting in Charlottetown between most of the premiers and five aboriginal leaders. The group’s plan for a roundtable discussion did not come with any details of when it would happen or how it would work. It is also unclear if Ottawa is interested. P.E.I. Premier Robert Ghiz, the host of the meeting, said that the roundtable idea is a good first step before an inquiry is held. “We believe that any dialogue, any collaboration on this subject is extremely important,” he said.

And finally, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt were married Saturday in Correns, France, a spokesman for the couple says. Jolie and Pitt wed in a small chapel in a private ceremony attended by family and friends at Chateau Miraval. In advance of the nondenominational civil ceremony, Pitt and Jolie obtained a marriage licence from a California judge. The judge also conducted the ceremony in France. The couple’s children took part in the wedding. Jolie walked the aisle with her eldest sons Maddox and Pax. Zahara and Vivienne threw flower petals. Shiloh and Knox served as ring bearers, the spokesman says. Jolie and Pitt’s wedding caps years of rampant speculation on when the couple would officially tie the knot. Both had publicly said that they planned to.

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